Catalano

Frank Catalano: Science is slowly destroying my childhood memories of, well ... science.

I grew up in an era when science reigned supreme. These were decades when NASA’s moon shots captured media attention, Jacques Cousteau’s ocean explorations captured public imagination and Star Trek’s vision of a peaceful, starfaring future captured network cancellation.

It was, in short, a time when it was hard not to be immersed in science. It inspired me to try my hand at writing science fiction, led to a career as a broadcast reporter and commentator covering science and technology, and -- now -- interesting work as a consultant to technology companies.

Yet a few years ago I started to suspect that all was not quite right with my nerdy childhood sweetheart.

In 2006, the International Astronomical Union fired the loudest and most public shot at collective childhood memories of science when it demoted Pluto to dwarf planet status. Pluto didn’t even get to be the largest dwarf planet. That honor when to Eris, discovered a year earlier.

This downgrading, though very public, was merely the final step in Pluto’s decades of declining fortunes. Pluto was discovered with great fanfare 80 years ago at the Lowell Observatory (and an astute observer will see that the astronomical symbol for Pluto -- PL -- also happens to reflect Observatory founder Percival Lowell’s initials). An eleven-year-old British girl suggested naming the cold, dark planet after the Roman god of the underworld, and in the same year a new Disney dog was licensed with the planet’s moniker. In keeping with tradition, a new element was dubbed Plutonium in the planet’s honor in 1941.

But that was the peak of Pluto’s platitudes. Within a few short years, doubts about Pluto’s suitability were raised. Perhaps the best indicator of Pluto’s waning status was tied to its estimated mass: in 1931, a year after its discovery, its mass was thought to be the same as Earth’s. Now, after years of reduction, the best estimate is Pluto has a mass less than one-quarter of one percent of Earth’s. For planets, size does matter.

Pluto’s removal from planethood led to to the American Dialect Society to declare its 2006 World of the Year as “plutoed,” which means “demoted or devalued.”

It seems every generation gets a plutoed childhood science memory. Venus was once thought to have lush, tropical jungles under its constant cloud cover and incessant, Seattle-like rain, providing a perfect setting for pulp science-fiction stories. All of that conclusively ended in October 1967 when the Mariner 5 spacecraft visited Venus only to confirm it was indeed hot -- but dry and desert like. And those clouds? Full of sulfuric acid.

Dinosaur memories, too, have suffered from activist scientists.

As a child, I delighted in images of the Brontosaurus (or "thunder lizard") as a beloved, gentle, swamp-dwelling and slow-moving vegetarian. But it turns out to have had the wrong name, the wrong head and the wrong lifestyle.

If there’s anyone to blame, it’s two paleontologists in the late 1800s. Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope were colleagues who had a falling out and started to compete on discoveries, spurring Marsh to first find a dinosaur he named the Apatosaurus, and then shortly afterward, a second, larger dinosaur he called the Brontosaurus.

The only problem was Marsh didn’t have a head for his Brontosaurus skeleton, so he appropriated one from a nearby dig. It wasn’t until 1970 that it was conclusively shown the “Brontosaurus” head was a Camarasaurus head, years after it was known that the large Brontosaurus skeleton was just that of a mature Apatosaurus.

It also turned out that the Brontosaurus probably wasn’t a swamp dweller (its feet weren’t suited for mud). And its huge tail didn’t necessarily slow it down. Nathan Myhrvold, the Microsoft research scientist, created a computer model before the turn of this century that suggested the tail might have been a formidable weapon and, cracked like a bullwhip, could make a deafening 200 decibel report, not unlike that of a cannon firing.

So, in 1974, the name Brontosaurus was formally removed from the records of paleontology, fully replaced by Apatosaurus, the appropriately nicknamed “deceptive lizard.” The old name continued in common use for quite a while longer and, perhaps in a prescient bit of technology foreshadowing, showed up in 1989 on a series of dinosaur stamps from the U.S. Postal Service.

Science is also changing other well-known childhood-era names.

This past spring on visits to southern California aquariums, I was surprised to see there wasn’t a starfish to be found. It appears that over the past decade marine biologists have been replacing starfish with “sea star,” saying it’s less likely to make laypeople think the creature is related to fish. What makes this odd is both “starfish” and “sea star” are common names; the actual scientific name is “Asteroidea.” Which would be even more confusing. (This is the kind of debate, by the way, that gives Wikipedia fits -- its official entry has bounced back and forth between “starfish” and “sea star” since 2007.)

For similar reasons, “jellyfish” are now “jellies.” For the moment, sea cucumbers and sea horses appear safe.

These are just a handful of examples. Yet every time I start to get cranky about how science is erasing my childhood memories of science, I stop, take a step back and think about what “science” itself is.

Science is not a static body of knowledge. Science is a process. That process replaces old knowledge with new based on hypothesis, experiment, observation and repeatable confirmation. It is exactly that process and flexibility that led me, as a child, to marvel at science. The process leads to progress.

“Science is self-correcting eventually, even when strong emotions are involved,” noted astronomer Mike Brown, the discover of Eris.

Admittedly, when it comes to childhood memories, it’s a kind of progress that sucks. But even if planets, dinosaurs and sea creatures can’t stand the test of time, science itself can.

Frank Catalano is an author and consultant on marketing, branding and product strategy for education and consumer technology companies. He blogs at Intrinsic Strategy and tweets @frankcatalano. This essay is adapted from Frank’s talk at Ignite Seattle 11. Opinions expressed in guest posts are those of their authors, and don't necessarily reflect the views of TechFlash or its staff.